More "miscellany" PART TWO (General)

by dhw, Sunday, December 04, 2022, 12:29 (481 days ago) @ David Turell

PART TWO

DAVID: The complexity of the biochemical designs requires using a mind like God's. After all it originally came from God's mind!

dhw: But you wrote: “Any design requires a mechanism as large as God’s mind.” How does the cell’s ability to design changes to itself come to mean that this ability must also be large enough to create universes?

DAVID: Why universes when all we are discussing is cell? You always invent the extraneous.
Because you wrote that “any design requires a mechanism as large as God’s mind.” I do not believe that cellular designs require the same sized mind as the mind that you believe creates universes.

Bad bugs teach us

DAVID: […] God's wry trick to let us learn about His intracellular design's?

dhw[…] Nothing about them accidentally ending up in the wrong places. You seem to be suggesting that your kindly God designed them to kill us so that we could learn how clever his designs are.

DAVID: God knew they might cause problems, thus potent immune systems!!!

dhw: Answered above. Elsewhere you even congratulate him on giving us the intelligence to work out solutions that he couldn’t figure out for himself. (And who cares about the suffering and death caused by his failures before and even after we came on the scene?)

DAVID: Perhaps, that is why He planned for us to be here.

To do what? Solve the problems your all-powerful, kindly God had accidentally created and couldn’t solve himself?

Brain changes

DAVID: God prepares new species for future requirements.

dhw: Sequence: Organisms can be changed. New conditions require/allow change. Changes are made to meet new requirements and may result in adaptation, new species or death (also a change!). New species have same ability to change, and will change or die under next lot of new conditions. In that sense, all species are or are not “prepared” for future requirements (depending on efficiency of existing ability), whether God does it directly or designs cells to do it directly. Survival depends on the ability to cope with or exploit new conditions when and not before they occur.

DAVID: Right. All species when they arrive are prepared for future necessary adaptations. The issue is the agency for speciation.

They are/were not all prepared for future adaptations. The majority of them died! The innate ability to change is what precedes new requirements, whether this means adaptation or innovation (resulting in speciation). And each adaptation/innovation/ extinction occurs in response to the new conditions.

Bacterial antibiotic resistance

DAVID: The battle continues. Here is dhw's wished for free-for-all. I think we will eventually win, as shown by recent research into chemicals that attack bacterial walls directly.

I don’t wish for anything. I look at the real world we know, and try to find explanations. If there is a God, I would love to know what he is like, and our world is the only indication I have. (I do not trust in the claims and dogmas of the various – and often conflicting – religions.) Your own dogma – that God designed everything in order to produce us and our food – raises the obvious question why he would design these murderous bacteria and their astonishing ways of defeating our attempts to get rid of them. A free-for-all would provide us with a logical explanation.

Strange brain tendrils

DAVID: These functions are automatic in fully functional brains and underlie/are triggered by decision making in the frontal cortex. It is not surprising the brain has 80-100 billion neurons. but also has billions of functional astrocytes and now these cilia. Not by chance.

Of course the implementation of the decision is automatic. It is the decision-making process that is the great mystery. You attribute all good decisions to God, but presumably any bad decision is the mouse’s own fault. The fact that so much research is done on mice suggests that the vast majority of cells in the human brain have evolved from our predecessors in the animal world. I agree of course that our degree of consciousness and intelligence is vastly superior to theirs, but we should never underestimate their own ability to devise the strategies, lifestyles and natural wonders that bring so much variety to life on Earth.

The danger of solar flairs

QUOTE: […] today, with the massive amounts of electricity-based infrastructure that now covers our planet, the danger is very, very real.

DAVID: you can imagine the damage he describes. The Carrington was over 156 years ago. dhw who will comment, about a 'bad' God who designed and allowed this problem. My response is easy. There is life here, and probably nowhere else. What is here and now was required to be here to allow life to arrive.

I simply question why your “kindly”, all-powerful God would design “bad” things like murderous bacteria and viruses. Any threat to Earth that is not human-made raises the same question – as does the whole history of a universe containing countless numbers of stars and solar systems that have come and gone. Your explanation is that your all-powerful, all-knowing, all-controlling God “had to” create all this, because all this was “required” to enable him to design us and our food. Why? You have no idea, and I must ask God.


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